Page:VCH Rutland 1.djvu/184

 A HISTORY OF RUTLAND If we are right in assuming that the assessment of South Rutland had been subjected in the half-century before 1086 to a series of reductions of the nature just described we should naturally expect to find that the plough- lands of the district, as representing the original units of assessment, were distributed among the local vills according to some definite system. An analysis of Wiceslei Hundred may therefore be given here : — Plough- Plough- Plough- Hides lands Hides lands Hides lands Great Casterton 3^ 9 Glaston. 5i 12 Tolethorpe i 4 Little Casterton 1 li Horn 3 6 Tinwell 5i 8 Seaton 2i 10 Essendine I 6 Ryhall Bisbrooke H 3h Tickencote 2J 6 Belmesthorpe Empingham I4J 27 N. LufFenham 4 10 Tixover 2 8 Barrowden 4 10 S. LufFenham 7i 14 Thorpe by Water H 4 Ketton. 7 13 Sculthorp Morcott 4 8 Liddington 2 16 In the first column of this table the figures are all irregular, and suggest no system. In the second column the plough-lands are all duodecimal in arrangement, for the 24 plough-lands assigned to North and South LufFen- ham with Kelthorpe can hardly be the result of chance. The figures in the third column are more peculiar. They are all multiples of four ; a unit which seems meaningless at first, but becomes significant when we remember the arrangement of the plough-lands in Martinsley Wapentake, given on page 124. It seems certain that if, as in the latter case, we possessed the clue to their disposition, we* should find that these eights and fours all fitted into duodecimal groups just as artificial as the system which governed the distribu- tion of the gelding carucates in the neighbouring counties of Leicester and Lincoln, and we cannot well doubt that the figures in column one, however irregular they may appear, were originally intended to fall into the same general scheme. In other words, we gather from the above analysis that the plough-lands of South Rutland, like those of the north of the modern county, were really conventional quantities, connected with an obsolete fiscal system which was based on a duodecimal system of rating and bore no necessary relation to the divisions of the soil upon which the agriculture of the period was based. At the date of the compilation of Domesday Book the northern part of Rutland, the wapentakes of Alstoe and Martinsley, was annexed for fiscal purposes to the shrievalty of Nottingham, and we are also given the perplex- ing statement that Alstoe Wapentake was half ' in ' the wapentake of Thur- garton and half in that of Broxtow in the latter county. No explanation of this singular arrangement is afforded by Domesday, and it is not easy to understand in what sense one wapentake could come to be divided between two others forming part of a somewhat distant shire. So far as we can tell the statement can only mean that the sheriff of Nottingham, in making his account with the king, assigned half the Alstoe geld to Thurgarton Wapen- take and half to that of Broxtow, and even so the origin of this practice is left unexplained. But an analysis of the Nottinghamshire Domesday, wapentake by wapentake, supplies at least a possible clue to the meaning of this strange piece of administrative geography. Nottinghamshire in 1086 contained eight wapentakes, and the following table gives the 126
 * } «